2000+ miles of outreach–part 1

I’ve been busily writing away at a couple of overdue papers, and the students have been going great guns processing and cataloging artifacts in the lab. While all this work is important, it doesn’t make for the most exciting blog posts, so I’ve been focusing on the papers.

Last week I wound up doing a couple of outreach events. The first was a public talk at the Murie Science and Learning Center at Denali National Park. Since I don’t live anywhere near Denali NP, this was no small undertaking. I flew to Anchorage, rented a car and went to the Apple store to pick up some video adapters for my Mac Air on Sunday, picked up my daughter Justine on Monday morning, and we made some sandwiches and set out. It is a 240 mile (more or less) north out of Anchorage, up the Parks Highway to the Park and the MSLC. I was speaking at 7 PM, but wanted to get there a bit early to make sure I found the place and my computer worked with their projector & so forth.

We had a pretty nice drive. The weather was sunny, but since I was driving north that was no problem. The drive is beautiful, although there were clouds around Denali (the mountain some call Mt. McKinley) so it wasn’t out.We stopped at a couple of viewing areas, but no luck. There are actually mountains between Denali and the Parks Highway, but Denali is so big it would have been visible anyway except for the clouds.

We made good time to Denali. It is very beautiful country, to my way of thinking, and gets prettier as you climb away from sea level and taiga forests with tundra on the mountains. It took a bit of doing to find the MSLC, but we succeeded.

Trip to Denali — Pathway to Murie Science and Learning Center. The white dinosaur footprints lead to the MSLC from the Denali NP Visitors’ Center.

Closer view of MSLC.

We got in touch with NJ Gates, who runs the speakers’ program and she got us settled. I made sure my computer worked with their projector. Although this was not a paying gig, they were kind enough to put us up in a yurt that they have for visiting researchers. Since there weren’t many around, we each got our own room. I had brought down sleeping bags & a Thermarest (since we thought one of us would be sleeping on the floor) from Barrow. The Park has wagons, and we used one to pull our gear to the yurt. I somehow didn’t manage to get a picture of the outside or the bear-proof box into which all food and toiletries went. The interior was divided into 3 rooms, 2 of which shared an entryway. We got those two.

After we got settled, we went to the grill at the visitors’ center for a quick dinner, and headed back to give the talk. We got a decent crowd for a Monday night, I thought. It went well, except for the earthquake in the middle of it. It was big enough to really shake the screen, and given that the MSLC is a heavy timber-frame building, I waited a few seconds to see if it would get bigger. It didn’t, so on we went. Some folks had a lot of questions, but we were all done, and in bed in the yurt by about 9:30.

This was important, because Justine had a doctor’s appointment in Anchorage at 11AM the next day. We got up at 4:15, grabbed a couple of sandwiches & a drink and were on the road a little after 5AM. The weather wants quite as nice, but it didn’t rain until we were nearly to Wasilla (yeah, that Wasilla), but stopped quickly a little later. Still no sight of Denali, but the drive was beautiful.

We made it to the doctor’s office around 10AM, I dropped Justine off, met my husband for lunch (he was in Anchorage on his way back from Ketchikan to Barrow), and caught a plane back to Barrow on Tuesday night.

Wednesday, we got ready for a visit by kids from the City of Barrow summer program. More about that in the next post.

Sometimes science produces unexpected results…

Much of today went trying to find freezer space for the person in the parka. We were able to get X-rays done by the North Slope Borough vet clinic (they needed a bit of practice with a new machine anyway), and there are skeletal elements in the parka. I talked to a conservator and it seems possible that the garments might be able to be preserved if the community chooses. We need to have a discussion with the Elders about that.

At least we need to document them really well, as they are being removed so the person can be examined and reburied. To do that we need not only a good videographer, but also a group of experience skin sewers, since the sinew has decayed, and it may only be possible to figure out what stitch was use by skilled sewers looking at the ghosts they left. We need to get the funds for that work, which probably won’t be available until October or so. That means that we need a freezer to keep the person in a stable environment until the examination can happen.

CPS/UMIAQ couldn’t really offer anything right now, except to note that it hadn’t been requested in the program plan last year (sadly, I’m not clairvoyant–if I were, we could skip all the pesky shovel testing). Fortunately, North Slope Borough Wildlife Management also has a freezer, and they were kind enough to step up and help out in this urgent situation. Many thanks to DWM! One UMIAQ fellow later thought of a freezer that might be a possible fallback, although it’s got stuff in it at the moment.

Next step, grant applications for that work and for the Ipiutak structure that remains at the bluff in the DWF, waiting for the next big storm to take it out.

Random Acts of Science – Blog – Geotagged Photos or “Hey! Dig here!”

Random Acts of Science – Blog – Geotagged Photos or “Hey! Dig here!”.

This is a pretty important point, and something most people probably don’t think about. It might not matter for well-know sites like Pompeii or something, but for a lot of places, it could be a problem. Why take a chance?

Nuvuk Project at Saturday Schoolyard!

I’ve mentioned the Saturday Schoolyard series of talks presented by the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium before. Tomorrow it’s the Nuvuk Archaeological Project’s turn! Heather Hopson and Trace Hudson, two of the students working on the project and I are going to be giving the presentation.

If you’re in Barrow, there’s a van leaving the library about 1:15 or so, or you can drive yourself to the BARC at NARL. The talk starts about 1:30.

If you’re not in Barrow, it will be streamed, technology spirits permitting, starting around 1:30 PM AKDT. The feed will probably start earlier. I’ll try to post the URL, but it should be the same as in an earlier post. They are now archiving the Schoolyard talks as well, and they can be found in iTunes U.

Adventures with journalists; or, I never said anything about 45,000 yr. old Eskimos

Obviously, I think that archaeology is interesting. In my experience, so do most non-archaeologists I meet. People ask lots of questions, and it’s amazing how many of them say they always wanted to be archaeologists (hey, we take volunteers!).

So, I imagine that there’s a reasonable audience for journalism (print, broadcast or Web) that covers it. The Arctic, as the canary in the climatic coal mine and home to endangered charismatic megafauna (AKA polar bears), also seems to be a hot journalistic topic. Given that Barrow is served by at least two jet flights a day and has decent connectivity, we get our fair share of journalists, and a fair number of them want to talk to me.

The public pays for most archaeology (and other science) so I think they deserve to hear what they’re paying for us to learn, especially since most people are interested in other people and their doings, as opposed to, say, permafrost or midge hatches, for which the interested audience may be smaller. So I take the time to talk to journalists. I also try to find out a bit about the journalist in question. If I get the sense that they are not very experienced with science or research, I’ll offer to at least check dates and spellings in their story before it goes to print, pointing out that that’s less embarrassing than having to issue corrections of errors later. Some take me up; some don’t.

I also take the time to attend panels on working with the media at scientific meetings. They are usually composed of a variety of people who are public information officers for scientific organizations or institutions and science journalists, often quite well-known ones who write for national science magazines or newspapers. They are all very earnest and full of good advice. They are usually amazed at the questions asked by the audience, and horrified by those of us who want to see stories prior to publication. They seem bewildered that the archaeologists making up the audience don’t all see journalists as friends and a great help.

Of course, if all journalists were like the ones on the panels, we probably would see them that way. I’ve worked with some great folks. Angelika Franz, a German writer who has done several pieces about Nuvuk, actually has a doctorate in archaeology, so she’s been great to work with, knowing what sorts of information are critical to get right, and understanding technical terms so we can concentrate on the interesting parts of the story. She has done pieces for Spiegel Online Wissenschaft, a magazine called Epoc and now she’s got a book coming out with a number of pieces she’s done.

I had great fun being interviewed (in Danish) by some Danish journalists who were retracing Knud Rasmussen’s travels across Arctic America. The story wound up mostly being about the fact that I have a complete set of the 5th Thule Report, in Barrow. We also had a nice trip to Nuvuk in the local tour van, which resulted in some good polar bear pictures for them.

Most of the others have been reasonably competent, and haven’t garbled the stories too much, although they haven’t written stories that answer the sorts of questions people ask me.

And then there are the others. There was a group of filmmakers working on video for a major producer of science programming. They had decided to focus on an ice scientist and his (cute female) grad student. It was spring, so there was not much to see at Nuvuk, but they wanted to go there anyway. They wanted to film them pulling up on snow machines. The tracks aren’t the best thing for the site, but we had already excavated the area near the bluffs, so I said that would be OK there. Of course, they didn’t like the shot, or the light, and wanted to have them coming from a different angle, and retake it, and I kept having to tell them to stay in the cleared area. Then they decided that the scientists/protagonists should start scraping away gravel from logs (actually a NARL-era sled shed base) projecting from the bluff, with their mittens. Since this is precisely what we want the public to avoid, it didn’t’ seem like a good idea to show them SCIENTISTS doing it on a reputable science TV series. I pointed that out, to no avail. So I told them I couldn’t be party to that, on film or off, and since they seemed bent on damaging the site, which belonged to my employer, I was going to have to ask them to leave.

Better yet was a Barrow reporter for the local newspaper, the Arctic Sounder. The Sounder is not a bad paper given the area it covers and the budget it has. However, I doubt that the editor considers this fellow one of his better hires. He was an odd duck. He once asked me to help him set up the Mac that the paper had given him so that he could file electronically. I got everything set up, and then went to plug the modem into the phone line (this was some years ago). He would not let me. I suggested that we could test it, and then he could plug it in to file and unplug it. No dice. He also thought there was a hole at the North Pole. He interviewed me about some work I had been doing, and in the course of the interview asked me how long people had been in the Barrow area. I said it was hard to be sure, since sea levels had risen and between that and erosion the earliest evidence was probably gone, but that there was some Arctic Small Tool Tradition (ASTt) material there, which was probably “4 to 5 thousand years old”.

Imagine my surprise at being quoted (in quotation marks, no less) as having said that there were “45,000-year-old Eskimos” in the Barrow area! I got calls from folks as far away as Pennsylvania (Tiger Burch for one) who basically wanted to know if I was off my rocker. When I suggested to the reporter that perhaps a correction was in order, he refused on the grounds that “someday they’ll find 45,000-year-old sites here, and then you’ll have been the first to say it in print.” I have heard, although I can’t confirm, that he was removed from town in a straitjacket.

And they wonder why archaeologists view journalists with a somewhat jaundiced eye…

How to write a news article about science? Spoof or template?

This is a news website article about a scientific finding | Martin Robbins | Science | guardian.co.uk.

This post on The Guardian’s science blog has drawn a fair amount on interest in “new media” science quarters.. It’s pretty funny, although it occurs to me that there are probably writers out there who are taking it as a template for future endeavors.

Very neat website about Science and Barrow

Barrow is a pretty interesting place in terms of the sheer amount and variety of science that gets done here, as it has been since the 1st International Polar Year (IPY). It can be hard keeping track of it even if you live here and are a scientist. We don’t have a local newspaper reporter, and the radio station can no longer afford a full-time reporter, so there is no local source of science stories for the general public.

Many scientists want to let people know what they are doing, and what they are learning by it, but there are a number of barriers (another post for another day). One way is blogging. On bigger hard-science projects, websites and more are possible, since the cost of people to take care of them is really a tiny portion of the project budget.

A recent project called OASIS really takes this to another level. Dr. Paul Shepson, the PI, actually built in an author to write about the project, and things grew from there. Peter Lourie, the author, has written two children’s’ books and has moved on to multimedia. They’ve made a really neat website, which has video from a number of scientists who work in Barrow. There’s a lot from various folks on the OASIS project, but also from people who live in Barrow, like Fran Tate of Pepe’s, whaling captain Eugene Brower and even me. I actually got interviewed twice, because the sound on the first set got messed up, so I had to do it all over again when Peter came up again!

Definitely worth checking out.

We see this much sun in December (although it snows a bit more…)

It has pretty much been overcast all week. The sun is not visible, although at times the clouds have thinned enough that it was fairly bright. Coupled with constant strong wind, and mixing in fog, rain showers, and a half-day of snow squalls, the weather has been unfortunate, to say the least. Despite all that, we managed to completely excavate two more burials, and start a third, as well as dig a whole bunch of STPs.

On Thursday, I stayed in town in the morning to take part in a call-in radio show on KBRW, the local public (in the best way) radio station, about the graves at Nuvuk, ancient and modern, and the issues about vehicle traffic and erosion, as well as some broader discussion of similar issues in the other North Slope villages. Delbert Rexford, UIC Land Chief, some of whose ancestors lived and are buried at Nuvuk, organized the show, which went in a time slot normally used by the North Slope Borough Health Department. They had a cancellation, so we filled in. We also had Wesley Aiken, a respected local elder, Patuk Glenn, from IHLC (the Inupiat History Language and Culture Commission), Vera Williams from NVB (the Native Village of Barrow–the local tribal government) realty department, and Heather Dingman from the Health Department. It went well, and we got several callers, including one who called to say they appreciated the work the NAP has been doing with the students, which was nice to hear. Thanks to Seismic Isaac Tuckfield for engineering, and letting us run over the time slot a bit.

Once we were done, I headed back home to put on the warm gear, and Dennis O’Rourke (who’d been catching up on manuscripts since no burial excavation that might require sampling was happening when I wasn’t there) and I headed out to Nuvuk. On the way, we ran into Mike and Patsy Aamodt. Mike has a set net near the site, and he and Patsy often stop and see how things are going. One of their nieces, Jackie, worked on the project for several years. Anyway, Mike has finally been getting fish (they’re late here like everywhere else in Alaska this year) and he asked if I would like one. Of course, yes, so he said he’d drop it off in my qanitchat (Arctic entryway, or stoop for those of you from upstate NY). When I got home, there were 3 lovely fresh chum salmon in a bag, so they needed to be taken care of right away.

Friday was still somewhat windy, with fairly serious rain for Barrow. Since the wind had changed direction, we would have had to move the windbreak before we could even start work, and our crew was very small. Flora left for firefighter training in Fairbanks (yeah, Flora!) and a couple of others were out for the day for various reasons, so we decided it was more sensible to do a lab day. That was a good thing, since I was having a minor freezer space crisis at home, and so I invited the non-local project members (AKA the grown-ups) plus Laura (& her husband Bryan and baby Violet) over to eat one of the fish for dinner. Jenny Raff contributed a fine salad, and beverages were provided by Laura & Bryan & Dennis. A fine time was had by all.

Today I went to the BASC Saturday Schoolyard talk, which featured a NOAA LTjg talking about hydrography (actually a very interesting talk) and then added all the week’s transit data to the catalog, updated the lab computer, and spent some time plotting the data and checking IDs for the radiocarbon dates I got in this week. After I finished that, I was going to head home and get the pictures ready to post on the week’s progress int he field. I’ve fallen a bit behind since standing in the cold wind at the transit for much of the day does take it out of you a bit, and then one tends to get really sleepy when one gets back into a warm building. However, I got a call from an archaeologist friend from Anchorage who brought her 17-year-old son to Barrow as a field trip for his Alaska Studies class (very cool), so I met them for dinner at Osaka, the local sushi restaurant (which is quite good). Just got back, as they are heading for Nuvuk on the Aarigaa Tours van tour. I’ll have to get the pictures ready for a descriptive post tomorrow.

Public Meetings & Archaeology

For the 2nd Tuesday evening in a row, I was at a public meeting being held by a NSB Assistant Borough Attorney, who is working on the monumental task of revising Titles 18 and 19 of the North Slope Borough Municipal Code. These Titles deal with permitting and land use, including issues affecting cultural resources. She’s certainly trying to do a good job, and the people who came had good input. Unfortunately, it’s been pretty nice weather both nights, so turnout was light.

Since I’m one of maybe 3 archaeologists resident in Barrow, and the others were otherwise occupied (well, I did bring Glenn along this evening), it seemed like it was pretty much my duty as a concerned citizen to go and make sure the attorney is aware of issues that she might not have thought of. Many more meetings in all the villages and more drafts and Planning Commission and then NSB Assembly need to pass it before anything really comes out of it, but at least there is some progress. I certainly hope so, since otherwise I might have finished a piece of needlepoint I’ve been working on for 6 months. Maybe tomorrow…

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